Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?

Although it’s cer­tain­ly more plau­si­ble than hypothe­ses like ancient aliens or lizard peo­ple, the idea that slaves built the Egypt­ian pyra­mids is no more true. It derives from cre­ative read­ings of Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ries and tech­ni­col­or Cecil B. Demille spec­ta­cles, and was a clas­sic whataboutism used by slav­ery apol­o­gists. The notion has “plagued Egypt­ian schol­ars for cen­turies,” writes Eric Betz at Dis­cov­er. But, he adds emphat­i­cal­ly, “Slaves did not build the pyra­mids.” Who did?

The evi­dence sug­gests they were built by a force of skilled labor­ers, as the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above explains. These were cadres of elite con­struc­tion work­ers who were well-fed and housed dur­ing their stint. “Many Egyp­tol­o­gists,” includ­ing archae­ol­o­gist Mark Lehn­er, who has exca­vat­ed a city of work­ers in Giza, “sub­scribe to the hypothe­ses that the pyra­mids were… built by a rotat­ing labor force in a mod­u­lar, team-based kind of orga­ni­za­tion,” Jonathan Shaw writes at Har­vard Mag­a­zine. Graf­fi­ti dis­cov­ered at the site iden­ti­fies team names like “Friends of Khu­fu” and “Drunk­ards of Menkau­re.”

The exca­va­tion also uncov­ered “tremen­dous quan­ti­ties of cat­tle, sheep, and goat bone, ‘enough to feed sev­er­al thou­sand peo­ple, even if they ate meat every day,’ adds Lehn­er,” sug­gest­ing that work­ers were “fed like roy­al­ty.” Anoth­er exca­va­tion by Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, famed Egypt­ian archae­ol­o­gist and expert on the Great Pyra­mid, has found work­er ceme­ter­ies at the foot of the pyra­mids, mean­ing that those who per­ished were buried in a place of hon­or. This was incred­i­bly haz­ardous work, and the peo­ple who under­took it were cel­e­brat­ed and rec­og­nized for their achieve­ment.

Labor­ers were also work­ing off an oblig­a­tion, some­thing every Egypt­ian owed to those above them and, ulti­mate­ly, to their pharaoh. But it was not a mon­e­tary debt. Lehn­er describes what ancient Egyp­tians called bak, a kind of feu­dal duty. While there were slaves in Egypt, the builders of the pyra­mids were maybe more like the Amish, he says, per­form­ing the same kind of oblig­a­tory com­mu­nal labor as a barn rais­ing. In that con­text, when we look at the Great Pyra­mid, “you have to say ‘This is a hell of a barn!’’’

The evi­dence unearthed by Lehn­er, Hawass, and oth­ers has “dealt a seri­ous blow to the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of a pyra­mid build­ing,” writes Shaw, “with Charl­ton Hes­ton as Moses inton­ing, ‘Pharaoh, let my peo­ple go!’” Recent arche­ol­o­gy has also dealt a blow to extrater­res­tri­al or time-trav­el expla­na­tions, which begin with the assump­tion that ancient Egyp­tians could not have pos­sessed the know-how and skill to build such struc­tures over 4,000 years ago. Not so. Ver­i­ta­si­um explains the incred­i­ble feats of mov­ing the out­er stones with­out wheels and trans­port­ing the gran­ite core of the pyra­mids 620 miles from its quar­ry to Giza.

Ancient Egyp­tians could plot direc­tions on the com­pass, though they had no com­pass­es. They could make right angles and lev­els and thus had the tech­nol­o­gy required to design the pyra­mids. What about dig­ging up the Great Pyramid’s 2 mil­lion blocks of yel­low lime­stone? As we know, this was done by a skilled work­force, who quar­ried an “Olympic swimming-pool’s worth of stone every eight days” for 23 years to build the Great Pyra­mid, notes Joe Han­son in the PBS It’s Okay to Be Smart video above. They did so using the only met­al avail­able to them, cop­per.

This may sound incred­i­ble, but mod­ern exper­i­ments have shown that this amount of stone could be quar­ried and moved, using the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able, by a team of 1,200 to 1,500 work­ers, around the same num­ber of peo­ple archae­ol­o­gists believe to have been on-site dur­ing con­struc­tion. The lime­stone was quar­ried direct­ly at the site (in fact the Sphinx was most­ly dug out of the earth, rather than built atop it). How was the stone moved? Egyp­tol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool think they may have found the answer, a ramp with stairs and a series of holes which may have been used as a pul­ley sys­tem.

Learn more about the myths and the real­i­ties of the builders of Egypt’s pyra­mids in the It’s Okay to Be Smart “Who Built the Pyra­mids, Part 1″ video above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What the Great Pyra­mids of Giza Orig­i­nal­ly Looked Like

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness